Maillardville and Festival du Bois: Coquitlam's French heart

Every March, a corner of Coquitlam turns French. Tents go up in Mackin Park, the smell of tourtiere and maple taffy drifts over Brunette Avenue, and thousands of people pull on the festival's signature green tuque, the one embossed with a frog. Festival du Bois is the public face of something older and deeper: Maillardville, the Tri-Cities' French Canadian neighbourhood, and one of the most distinctive origin stories in Metro Vancouver.

The "Honeymoon Special"

Maillardville's story starts with a sawmill and a labour shortage. In 1909, Fraser Mills, on its way to becoming the largest sawmill operation in the British Empire, needed workers who knew the forest industry, and it looked east to find them. The company recruited French Canadians with an attractive offer: steady work at $2.50 a day for a 10-hour day, six days a week, plus access to land for their families, wood to build a house, and the freedom to preserve their language. The recruiters even joked that the newcomers could leave their umbrellas behind in Quebec.

On September 28, 1909, the first contingent arrived at Fraser Mills Station: about 110 French Canadians from Rockland, Ontario, and from Hull and Sherbrooke, Quebec, travelling together by rail. The train was nicknamed the "Honeymoon Special" because so many couples had married the night before departure. More workers followed the next year, and the community they built quickly became the largest French-speaking community west of Saint-Boniface.

Building a community from scratch

The pioneers found work waiting but little else. What they built in the following years was a remarkably complete francophone town. Fraser Mills donated the site and materials for a Catholic church, and by 1910 parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes were celebrating Christmas mass in the church they had raised on Laval Square. The young French priest who spent two years with the settlers, Father Edmond Maillard, left such a mark that the community was named in his honour in 1912.

Stores opened along Pitt River Road, later renamed Brunette Avenue: the Proulx general store, which doubled as the post office, a butcher, a shoemaker, a billiard hall and the Tremblay community hall. The community organized a police chief, a volunteer fire brigade that answered to the church bells, a francophone Catholic school, a band, bingo nights, hockey and baseball teams, and an annual family picnic at the Booth farm. Street names in the neighbourhood still carry the names of those pioneering families.

A fighting streak

Maillardville also has a proud place in B.C. labour history. When conditions at the mill deteriorated, workers banded together in 1931 in what became a precursor of the labour union movement in British Columbia. The community survived the strike the way it survived everything: together, with women and children running a community kitchen.

Twenty years later came the school strike of 1951. Believing the Catholic schools were being treated unjustly, the community struck on April 2, and the Catholic School Board marched with 840 students before transferring them to the public system. The dispute drew attention across Canada and even a BBC report from London. The immediate fight was lost, but the longer campaign won a lasting prize: an exemption from property taxes for Catholic schools, not just in Maillardville but across the province.

Festival du Bois today

The festival that celebrates all this began in March 1990 and has run ever since, produced by the Societe francophone de Maillardville. It takes over Mackin Park on the final weekend of March each year; in 2025 the dates were March 7 to 9.

The site is built around a main stage tent featuring mostly Canadian folk, Celtic and world music artists, with a children's stage, a workshop tent, art and history displays and tours of the Mackin House Museum. The food is half the draw: tourtiere, poutine, smoked meat sandwiches, maple taffy and maple sugar pies. And then there is the headgear. The official Festival du Bois tuque is green with a frog on it, a cheerful nod to the festival's French roots, and it is everywhere by the end of the weekend.

The festival's scale has been recognized well beyond the Tri-Cities. In 2008 it drew more than 17,000 people, and Business in Vancouver has counted it among the biggest festivals and cultural events in Metro Vancouver.

Visiting Maillardville the rest of the year

The neighbourhood rewards a wander even when the tents are down. Mackin Park and the Mackin House Museum anchor the historic core, the street names tell the founding families' stories, and the community the pioneers built remains proudly francophone. Festival du Bois acknowledges that it takes place on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Kwikwetlem First Nation, a reminder that Maillardville's chapter is one of many in this place's longer history.